Donny The Drone

The world’s first sentient machine goes on stage to accept a prestigious “Person of the Year” award as an auditorium of humans are confronted with his emotional and controversial story.

A story truly depicted for today’s state of mind between politics and technology. Donny The Drone paints a picturesque photograph of the relationship between humans and robots, and tells a refreshing story about the world’s first sentient machine winning the prestigious “Person of the Year” award, in which an auditorium of humans are confronted with his emotional and controversial story.

We wanted to make a film that took the current atmosphere of technology and society and ran with it. Our aim was to enter the conversation around A.I. and machine-learning from a different perspective. And creatively, we were really interested in taking a non-human character and making him as human as possible. Could we make him feel? Could we make him emotional? These questions informed our decisions with the story telling.

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As the film sways away from the typical robot apocalypse scenario, the idea certainly sounds like it can be a type of origin story for Skynet or The Matrix. But the brilliant approach by director Mackenzie Sheppard to introduce this new “leader” as a humanitarian and saviour of people, builds an incredible connection and compassion towards the flying machine. What starts off as a new hope for humanity, ends up with subtle forms of doubt – left for your judgement.

Our approach to technology as a subject matter was to come at it from a magical place. We didn’t want to explain everything. We didn’t want to be overly literal or technical. We just wanted to establish this character, introduce him and let the audience catch up as his story unfolded. Where it made sense to take a creative leap or be abstract, we went for it, as long as it served the story.

We hope that people are of course entertained by this film. And we also hope that it plants some ideas and concepts that keep people thinking long after the end credits roll. We see this film as a time capsule or portrait of society’s psychological state in 2018.

Beyond the exquisite photography and tremendous productions values, Donny The Drone being voiced by Guy Pearce simply brings the film to another level. Loving the that Guy is being so involved with shorts lately, we’ve just seen him starring in ‘Lorne‘ just a few weeks ago.